Get Ready For Everything You Do To End Up On Facebook

At a party hosted by Facebook last Thursday, I heard a lot about the
company's
new iPhone app, but also about an "under the radar" feature
called Activity that people seemed really excited about.

After using Activity the past week or so pretty extensively, I've
realized that it's an even bigger deal than
Timeline, Facebook's big profile redesign. And nobody's
talking about it yet.

Not too far from now, everything you do on a computer or mobile
device will tie in directly to Facebook, complete with time
stamps for when you did something.

Activity is a screen that shows a giant list of every single
thing you've done on Facebook, plus any songs you've listened to,
articles you've read, events you've attended, and soon, much
more. It's built on top of a platform called Open Graph.

When Facebook announced Open Graph at its F8 Conference this
summer, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about various apps
that will plug into Open Graph like Netflix, Nike+, Foodspotting, and more. Since,
we've heard from Kobo about a social feature present in its
e-readers called Reading Life. When you finish a book, your
e-reader can post the update to your Facebook profile.

These apps don't tie in just yet, but they will soon.

Here's an example of how an Activity page looks today:

As you can see, you'll be able to literally see a minute to
minute break down of what you did every day of your life.

Activity is incomplete until many more apps can tie in, but
here's how the future might look when you glance back at a day in
your past:

First, you checked into a bar to watch a football game using
Foursquare, and then you went home and
finished a book you were reading on Kobo. Afterwards, you
listened to a new album using Spotify, and then you snapped a picture of the
leaves changing colors in your backyard using Instagram. Once you got hungry, you opened up
Foodspotting on your iPad and picked a recipe to cook. To cap off
the night, you watched a few episodes of TV on Netflix.

These apps will let you enable automatic posting to Facebook for
when you do just about anything, which is pretty revolutionary.
Your entire life can be recorded on Facebook, if you flip the
"share" switch to On in each app.

Making your automatic posts public is the craziest, but also
possibly the most enriching part of the whole deal.

Giving a recommendation based on what
somebody's listening to.

A future with "Realtime Serendipity," as Facebook calls it, is a
future where you start conversations based on a song you saw
someone listening to.

It's a future where someone sees that you've started baking a
pecan pie, and recommends you toss in some secret spice.

It's a future where someone sees you watching an episode of
Heroes on Netflix, then tells you to skip the last two
seasons.

There aren't very many things Open Graph will be unable to
track—besides real interaction with another human, that is.
Unless you friend that human after your conversation, of
course.